Assange says the politics of centrism and the Democrats' neglect of their base are why they can't move forward

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June 26, 2017 4:33PM (UTC)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had strong words for the Democratic Party on Sunday, blaming party leaders for forcing the politics of centrism on their base. That's why the Democrats are "doomed," he wrote in a TwitLonger post.

The Democratic establishment has vortexed the party's narrative energy into hysteria about Russia (a state with a lower GDP than South Korea). It is starkly obvious that were it not for this hysteria insurgent narratives of the type promoted by Bernie Sanders would rapidly dominate the party's base and its relationship with the public. Without the, 'We didn't lose — Russia won' narrative the party's elite and those who exist under its patronage would be purged for being electorally incompetent and ideologically passé. The collapse of the Democratic vote over the last eight years is at every level, city, state, Congressional and presidential.

Assange may have a point, insofar as the Russia narrative has consumed so much of the media landscape that it may have eclipsed Democrats' efforts to regain the roughly 1,000 legislative seats it has lost over the past nine years.

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Democrats have also lost all four of the congressional special elections since January, and the predicted surge in Democratic turnout has failed to materialize. As Salon's Andrew O'Hehir pointed out, the reason the races were close is because Republicans had an even worse turnout.

"Without collusion, we are left with the Democratic establishment blaming the public for being repelled by the words of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party establishment," Assange wrote.

There's an obvious comeback here: Assange and WikiLeaks likely played a role in the election outcome by leaking hacked Democratic Party emails that were presumably provided by Russian intelligence, either directly or through an intermediary. But the questions Assange has posed are nonetheless valid.

"Is it a problem that the public discovered what Hillary Clinton said to Goldman Sachs and what party elites said about fixing the DNC primaries against Bernie Sanders?" Assange wrote. "A party elite that maintains that it is the 'crime of the century' for the public and their membership to discover how they behave and what they believe invites scorn."

Assange finished by calling for the formation of a new party. "The Democratic base should move to start a new party since the party elite shows no signs that they will give up power."

Charlie May

Charlie May is a news writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter at @charliejmay